NerdQX 8T review: the desk miner that runs silent

The NerdQX belongs to the desk miner family, also called solo or lottery miners. The goal is not a steady income like an industrial farm, but to take part in the Bitcoin network on your own, with a small but real chance of validating a whole block and keeping the entire reward.

What sets it apart: it is an open-source project from an independent team. That shows in the build quality and the price, as we will see.

In the box: the miner, a 250 W power supply and the manual. If you have handled stock power supplies from desk miners before, you know they are often very light and run very hot. This one is heavy, which inspires confidence, and it has its own small fan at the back.

It connects through an XT60 plug, a sturdy format from RC models, and the cable comes fitted. If you ever use your own power supply, keep that format in mind.

The NerdQX 8T is an evolution of the NerdQAxe+: take a proven base and push its thermal limits. At its heart, four BM1370 chips do all the hashing. They are cooled by a heat-pipe heatsink and a PWM fan that adjusts its speed to the temperature, and the whole thing stays under 45 dB in typical use: quiet enough for an office or a living room.

The QX range’s signature is the care given to the voltage regulators, the parts that power the chips. When you push a miner, they are often the first to fail from overheating, and on earlier generations you had to improvise to cool them. Here it is designed in.

The machine lies flat on the desk, with a screen showing hashrate, temperature, power and efficiency in real time.

In industrial mining, a few percent of efficiency decide whether hundreds of machines are profitable. For a solo desk miner, the difference is a few euros a month: it should not be the deciding factor.

More interesting: the power supply delivers 250 W while the machine draws 165 at stock settings. That headroom is what allows it to scale up, as we will see.

Plug in the power supply and the machine starts. Everything is then set from a web page on your local network. Note: it connects over 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, 5 GHz is not supported.

In the interface, enter your pool and pick a mode: solo to try for a block on your own, the typical lottery-miner use, or PPLNS and PPS, two pool modes where earnings are shared and regular. The machine also handles other SHA-256 coins, such as Bitcoin Cash. To mine solo on my pool: the FindMyBlock guide.

At stock settings the machine delivers about 7.8 TH/s for 165 W. That is its intended operating point, with comfortable temperatures and a long life ahead. That is where to leave it day to day.

For the curious, the interface lets you raise the chips’ frequency and voltage. My precaution before touching anything: fan at maximum rather than automatic, and two temperatures to watch, the chips and the regulators.

Raising it step by step, it passes 8 then 9 TH/s, and the regulator temperature stays in check: that is their dedicated cooling at work. Past 10 TH/s, each chip exceeds 2.5 TH/s and the draw climbs to about 215 W, which is why the 250 W supply matters. That the machine holds these values without a hiccup says a lot about its design.

At 7.8 TH/s, about 1 chance in 2,450 per year solo, and about 1 in 1,910 past 10 TH/s (network as of 17 October 2026). The full math: How much does a Bitaxe earn?

The NerdQX 8T is not the most powerful desk miner, others beat it. What sets it apart is balance: 7.8 TH/s for 165 W, silence, a compact format, careful build quality, several coins and a warranty, for about $324 with the power supply.

If you want a well-designed, versatile and quiet machine, and backing an independent project appeals to you, it is an excellent choice.